On the Edge With Sean M. Johnson

On the outside edge of balance and before a fall, Sean M. Johnson makes sculpture. At 26, he’s deep in the territory of generations before him: Alexander Calder’s massive discs in delicate suspension, and Mark de Suvero’s tons of steel layered with logs in casual abandon.

Johnson’s balancing act is not based in abstraction, however. His objects carry a blunt narrative within their precarious arrangements, like a Kienholz in toe shoes.

“Last Call,” 2007

“Last Call” is the guy who’s loaded and looking for the front door. He may be talking baseball, but his attention’s on his feet. He’ll need the agility of a mountain goat to carry him with any dignity out of the bar. For him, time has slowed, and the focus he needs to impersonate normal is no longer available. Before the inevitable fall, Johnson uses ordinary objects to take his picture. Like him, they’re suspended without glue or screws or rods to keep them vertical.

“Under The Table” takes place later in the night, the title alluding to the bar boast, to drink you under one. The table itself becomes the man, its legs in the air and resting on a tower of beer cans, the table in effect under itself.

Johnson’s photos are more light-hearted, such as “Spoonful,” in which a china cup rests on the edge of its saucer, a spoon and a heap of sugar temporarily holding it in place.

Johnson is the equivalent of a dancer. Like Susan Marshall, he loads a narrative on a lean line of gesture and carries the weight of a story without sinking into literalism.

At Crawl Space through Saturday (closing date wrong on the Web page), Johnson and Kirk Lang (interested in coils and their springs) collaborate as well as having room for their own work, curated by artist Jason Wood.

Their DVD running in the gallery could be subtitled “Chair Torture” as a shout out to Bruce Nauman. (Every day all across the world there needs to be shout outs to Nauman: Hi Bruce!) The chair loaded on springs is released to smash to the ground, over and over. Better it than us except, somehow, it feels like it’s us, caught in an endless loop of misadventures.

Crawl Space and Soil are the two top artist collectives in the city. What would we do without them? I can’t imagine why Johnson wasn’t immediately snapped up by a good gallery after he graduated from the University of Washington several years ago. Their loss. He’ll leave town and become another Alyson Schotz.